Ludwig and Jacob (2009).Pdf

Changing Poverty, Changing Policies

Cancian, Maria, Danziger, Sheldon

Published by Russell Sage Foundation

Cancian, Maria. and Danziger, Sheldon. Changing Poverty, Changing Policies. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009. Project MUSE. Web. 7 Jul. 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781610445986

Access provided by University of Wisconsin @ Madison (16 Nov 2015 12:04 GMT) Chapter 10

Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children

Brian A. Jacob and Jens Ludwig

ne of the best ways to avoid being poor as an adult is to obtain a good education. As Katherine Magnuson and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal’s chapter in Othis volume notes, people who have higher levels of academic achievement and more years of schooling earn more than those with lower levels of human capital. This is not surprising in light of the belief by economists that schooling makes people more productive and that wages are related to productivity. Yet in modern America poor children face an elevated risk for a variety of adverse educational outcomes. In the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 16 percent of fourth-grade students eligible for free lunch scored at proficient levels in reading, compared with 44 percent of fourth graders whose family incomes were above the eligibility cutoff for free lunch; the disparity in math scores was even larger, 21 percent versus 53 percent (NCES 2007a; NCES 2007b). Equally large disparities in achievement test scores are observed between whites and minority racial or ethnic groups, with test score gaps that show up as early as three or four years of age (Jencks and Phillips 1998).1 In fact, the black- white test score gap among twelfth-graders may not be all that different in magnitude from the gap observed among young children when they first start school (Phillips, Crouse, and John 1998; Ludwig 2003). Understanding why children’s outcomes vary so dramatically along race and class lines in America is central to formulating effective education policy interventions. Disagreements about how to improve schooling outcomes for poor children stem in part from different beliefs about the problems that underlie the unsatisfactory outcomes in many of our nation’s public schools. Broadly speaking, critics tend to invoke, at least implicitly, one of the following reasons why children in high-poverty schools are not performing as well as we would like:

1. Schools serving poor and minority students have fewer resources than they need. In this case, a potential solution would be to provide more money to disadvantaged schools.

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2. High-poverty schools lack the capacity to make substantial improvements in student learning, independent of financial resources. Under this perspective, the teachers and administrators in highly disadvantaged school districts are thought to lack the skills or knowledge necessary to improve the quality of instruction on their own. Potential solutions to this problem would involve helping schools improve the quality of their standard operating practices, for example, by helping to implement specific new instructional or organizational practices (that is, curriculum, instruction, school organization) or by increasing the instructional capacity of staff in these schools through professional development or more selective hiring. The success of this approach depends criti- cally on whether there exist particular instructional, organizational, human resources, or other practices that are known to be effective and on how easily these practices could be implemented across different contexts. 3. High-poverty schools do not have sufficient incentives and/or flexibility to improve instruction. High-poverty schools underperform because teachers and administrators are not working hard enough, they are not working toward the right goal, or they have good local knowledge about what would work best but are unable to implement these ideas because of centralized authority. Proponents of this perspective often claim that without clarifying the key objectives of schools and holding key actors accountable, additional spending is simply squandered. Their solution is to enhance incentives and provide local actors with more flexibility through policies such as school choice or accountability. 4. Schools matter only so much. The real problem rests with the social context in which schools operate—namely, the family, neighborhood, and peer environments that under this perspective make it difficult for low-income children to take advantage of educational opportunities. Adopting accountability or market- oriented reforms without changing social policy more broadly simply punishes educators for factors beyond their control and may drive the most able teachers toward schools that serve less disadvantaged students.

For some reason, current education policy debates often seem to be argued as if these problems are mutually exclusive. In contrast, we believe that there is probably some truth to each of these major explanations—in other words, there is no single problem with our schools (and so potentially no single solution). Identifying the optimal policy response to the mix of problems that plague our public schools is complicated by the possibility that these problems might interact with each other. For example, it may be the case that certain curriculum reforms are effective only if they are accompanied by an increase in resources such as student support services, or by an increase in teacher quality generated by reforms to hiring and tenure policies. Social science theory and common sense are likely to carry us only so far in identifying the most effective—and most cost-effective—mix of education policy changes. For almost every education intervention that some theory suggests might be effective, there is another plausible theory suggesting that the intervention will be ineffective or even harmful. Education policy also needs to be guided by rigorous evaluation evidence about what actually works in practice.

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Evaluation research in education has typically focused on easily measured and relatively short-term student outcomes, such as achievement test scores or school attainment. For this reason, most of the evidence we discuss here emphasizes these outcomes. In general, we expect these outcomes to be positively correlated with other important but harder-to-measure educational outcomes that society cares about, such as a student’s interest in school or classroom behavior. But in some cases interventions could have different types of impacts on easy-to-measure versus harder-to-measure outcomes, as might occur, for example, with current proposals to shift Head Start’s emphasis from comprehensive services to more academically oriented instruction. In these cases, understanding impacts on test scores or attainment may not be sufficient, but is still useful since these educational outcomes are associated with both a child’s chances of becoming poor as an adult and other life outcomes that society cares about. More generally, in principle there is no reason why education research could not track other outcomes, such as a student’s interest in school or a student’s classroom behavior. Research over the past four decades has unfortunately fostered the impression that when it comes to improving schools for poor children, “nothing works.” One of the first studies to contribute to this sense of pessimism was the landmark report by the sociologist James Coleman and his colleagues (1966). Drawing on a large, nationally representative sample, the so-called Coleman Report found that most of the variation in student test scores occurred within rather than across schools, that family background was the strongest predictor of academic achievement, and that most measurable school inputs, like student-teacher ratios, were only weakly correlated with student outcomes. Subsequent evaluation studies of different educational interventions also tended to be disappointing and contributed to the pessimism about the ability of schools to increase poor children’s life chances (Levin 1977; Glazer 1986; Jencks 1986). In contrast, our chapter offers a message of tempered optimism. In the past few decades, dramatic improvements in the technology of education policy evaluation have enhanced our ability to uncover moderately sized program impacts within the complex environment that determines schooling outcomes. The available evidence reveals a number of potentially promising ways to improve the learning outcomes of low-income children. This is not to say that everything works: many current and proposed education policies either enjoy no empirical support for their effectiveness or in some cases enjoy strong empirical evidence for their ineffectiveness. But a careful sifting of the empirical evidence identifies a selected set of interventions that seem to be promising. Our optimism is tempered by the recognition that the most successful educational interventions reduce, but do not eliminate, racial and social class disparities in educational outcomes. This is not a reason for either despair or inaction. The appropriate standard of success for policy interventions is that they generate net benefits, not miraculous benefits. Education policies that are capable of improving poor children’s schooling outcomes by enough to justify the costs of these policies are worth doing, even if these policies or programs by themselves are not enough to equalize learning opportunities for all children in America.

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The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. In the next section, we review three areas in which we believe that increased resources may yield important benefits for poor children: early childhood interventions, class size reductions in the early grades implemented in ways that hold the quality of teachers constant, and initiatives to attract and retain the highest-quality teachers in disadvantaged schools. We then examine reforms that do not require a large investment of resources but instead seek to change how schools operate, from curriculum and instruction changes to changes in teacher hiring and promotion policy. There have been relatively few rigorous evaluations of specific school practices; we suggest that enacting meaningful federal or state mandates that schools use “evidence- based” methods would increase the supply of rigorous evaluations (Jacob and Ludwig 2005). In the next section, we review the literature on school accountability and school choice policies, which aim to change the goals, incentives, and organizational structure within which schools and families operate. The evidence on school accountability is moderately encouraging, though recent findings suggest that the design of accountability policies matters a great deal. There is less evidence that current public or private school choice plans improve student outcomes, but we argue that states and districts should continue to experiment with and evaluate a variety of choice options. In the next section, we discuss the extent to which student socioeconomic background influences the effectiveness of educational interventions. We pay particular attention to the role played by residential segregation with respect to race and social class, since schooling has a clear place-based character. We conclude by summarizing what we believe are the most promising education policies for improving the life chances of disadvantaged children.

SCHOOL RESOURCES

The question of whether “money matters” has been the subject of contentious debate in the research literature for the past forty years. Isolating the causal effects of extra school funding is complicated by the possibility that compensatory spending may be directed toward those schools serving the most disadvantaged students and that adequately controlling for all aspects of student disadvantage is quite difficult in practice. A few recent studies have used policy changes that generate sharp changes in school funding and find some impact on student outcomes (Figlio 1997; Card and Payne 2002; Guryan 2004). Nevertheless, the weight of the evidence provides fairly weak support for the idea that increases in unrestricted school funding on average improve student outcomes (see, for example, Hanushek 1997). In contrast, there is stronger evidence that some targeted increases in specific school inputs can improve student outcomes. This apparent paradox can be reconciled by noting that schools need not dedicate any unrestricted funding increases to those uses that are most effective in improving children’s learning outcomes. In this section, we discuss three specific areas in which we believe increased resources may yield important benefits for poor children: increased investments in early childhood education, class size reductions in the early grades, and targeted salary bonuses to help disadvantaged schools recruit and retain better teachers.

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Early Childhood Education

Disparities in academic achievement by race and class are apparent as early as ages three and four, well before children enter kindergarten. Recent research in neuro- science, developmental psychology, economics, and other fields suggests that the earliest years of life may be a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; Carniero and Heckman 2003; Knudsen et al. 2006). Studies show that early childhood educational programs can generate learning gains in the short run and, in some cases, improve the long-run life chances of poor children. Moreover, the benefits generated by these programs are large enough to justify their costs. The Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programs are commonly cited as examples of high-quality preschool services that can change the lives of low-income children. A small group of children who participated in these programs in the 1960s and 1970s have been followed for many years and on average have better outcomes in a range of domains compared to a randomly assigned group of control children (Schweinhart et al. 2005; Ramey and Campbell 1979; Campbell et al. 2002; Barnett and Masse 2007). Despite the high cost of these programs, these studies suggest that their total economic benefit exceeded their costs (Belfield et al. 2006; Barnett and Masse 2007). Although these results are encouraging, it is important to keep in mind that these are model programs that were unusually intensive and involved small numbers of children in just two sites. Nevertheless, the evidence on publicly funded early education programs, illus- trating what can be achieved for large numbers of children in programs of vari- able quality, is also very encouraging. A recent random assignment evaluation of Head Start found positive short-term effects of program participation on a variety of cognitive skills on the order of 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations, with typically positive effects on noncognitive outcomes as well (though they are usually not statistically significant).2 A rigorous evaluation of Early Head Start, a program serving children under age three in a mix of home- and center-based programs, found positive effects on some aspects of parent practices and children’s development, but the effects were generally smaller than for Head Start (Love et al. 2002). Vivian Wong and her colleagues (2008) find that several recent state-initiated universal pre-K programs have even larger impacts on short-term cognitive test scores than does Head Start (see also Gormley et al. 2005; Gormley and Gayer 2005). Why might the new state pre-K programs generate larger gains than does Head Start? One explanation is that pre-K programs hire more qualified teachers, pay them more, and offer a more academically oriented curriculum than do Head Start programs. Another explanation is that the Head Start comparison group received more center-based care than did children in the pre-K comparison group.3 A third possible explanation is that the recent Head Start study relies on a rigorous randomized experimental design, while the research design of the new state pre-K studies is more susceptible to bias from selection problems (see Ludwig and Phillips 2007).4

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Although these short-run achievement gains from both Head Start and newer state pre-K programs are impressive, the crucial question is whether these effects persist over time. To explore longer-run impacts, we must rely on non-experimental studies of children who participated in Head Start decades ago and control for potential confounding factors (Currie and Thomas 1995; Garces, Thomas, and Currie 2002; Ludwig and Miller 2007; and Deming 2007). These studies suggest lasting effects on schooling attainment and perhaps criminal activity, although test score effects appear to fade out over time for many children. Nonetheless, the positive long-term effects seem large enough to generate benefits that outweigh program costs. It is possible that the long-term effects of Head Start on more recent cohorts of children are different from those for previous cohorts of program participants because program quality changes over time, or because the developmental quality of the environments that children would experience as an alternative to Head Start changes. But the short-term test score impacts that have been estimated for recent cohorts of Head Start participants appear to be similar to what we see for earlier cohorts of children for whom we also now have evidence of long-term benefits. So there is room for cautious optimism that Head Start might improve the long-term outcomes for recent waves of program participants as well, even though this hypothesis cannot be directly tested for many years (Ludwig and Phillips 2007). Preschool interventions represent a promising way to improve the life chances of poor children, but their success is not well reflected in federal government budget priorities, which allocate nearly seven times as much money per capita for K–12 schooling as for prekindergarten (pre-K), other forms of early education, and child care subsidies for three- to five-year-olds (Ludwig and Sawhill 2007). Most social policies attempt to make up for the disadvantages that poor children experience early in life. But given the substantial disparities that already exist between very young poor children and very young nonpoor children, it is perhaps not surprising that many disadvantaged children never catch up. For this reason, we believe that efforts to improve young children’s school readiness with proven, high-quality programs should play a much more prominent role in our nation’s antipoverty strategy than they do today.

Class Size Reduction

Reducing average class sizes may enable teachers to spend more time working with individual students, to tailor instruction to match children’s needs, and to monitor classroom behavior more easily. But class size reductions are expensive. Additional teachers must be hired, and in some cases a school’s physical space must be expanded. Nonetheless, the best available evidence suggests that class size reduction, holding teacher quality constant, can improve student outcomes by enough to justify these additional expenditures, with benefits that are particularly pronounced for low-income and minority children.

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The evidence in favor of class size reduction comes mainly from Tennessee’s Project STAR, which randomly assigned 11,600 students in grades K–13 and 1,330 teachers to small classes (thirteen to seventeen students), regular-size classrooms (twenty-two to twenty-five students), or regular-size classrooms that also included a teacher’s aide.5 The random assignment of teachers to different classroom environments in this study ensured that the average quality of teachers in small versus regular-size classrooms would be the same, a critical point to which we return in the context of policy efforts to take class size reduction to scale. Class size reductions of around one-third during these early grades increased Stanford-9 reading and math scores by around 0.12 standard deviations for whites and 0.24 standard deviations for blacks. Impacts were larger for students attending mostly black schools, although even within such schools, black students benefited somewhat more than did whites (Krueger and Whitmore 2002). Similarly, impacts were somewhat larger for students who were eligible for the free lunch program. Follow-up evaluations of STAR find long-term benefits of attending a small elementary school class—the test score impacts seem to persist through eighth grade, although they decline by one-half to two-thirds (Achilles et al. 1993; Nye et al. 1995; Krueger and Whitmore 2001). As with the short-term effects, the eighth-grade test scores reveal larger gains among low-income and minority students. More- over, black students in the treatment group were roughly five percentage points (or 15 percent) more likely to take a college entrance exam (the SAT or ACT) during high school (Krueger and Whitmore 2001, 2002).6 The test score gains induced by smaller classes in STAR are probably large enough to justify the costs, even when we focus just on the benefits that arise from test scores on future earnings alone (Krueger 2003; Krueger and Whitmore 2001; Schanzenbach 2007). The results from Project STAR are encouraging, but they come from a controlled experiment that held the quality of teachers constant by randomly assigning teachers as well as students across classrooms. A sobering example of the challenges of taking class size reduction to scale comes from the California experience. California introduced a statewide initiative to reduce primary grade class sizes in 1998–1999, which required schools to not only hire a large number of new teachers but also find additional physical space for the new classrooms (Borhnstedt and Stecher 2002; Jepsen and Rivkin 2002). The policy was implemented over a short time period. Many low-income school districts found it difficult to hire qualified teachers and had trouble arranging for adequate classroom space. Christopher Jepsen and Steven Rivkin (2002) argue that much of the benefit from smaller classes in California was lost due to reductions in average teacher quality, particularly in lower-income urban school districts. California’s experience illustrates the complexity of taking education policy reforms to a large scale. It suggests the potential value of focusing class size reductions in low-income districts or schools, as well as the importance of careful implementation of the program so as to minimize any adverse effects on teacher quality or physical capital. As long as these implementation efforts did not raise costs too much relative to STAR, it still seems plausible that a large-scale program to reduce class sizes might pass a benefit-cost test.

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Bonuses for Teaching in High-Needs Schools or Subjects

Research has identified substantial variation across teachers in the ability to raise student achievement. These studies estimate teacher effectiveness by comparing changes in student achievement scores across classrooms, controlling for student, classroom, and school characteristics that influence achievement regardless of the teacher. Because these studies attempt to isolate the value that a teacher adds to student achievement, they are referred to as “teacher value-added” studies. These studies document substantial variation in teacher effectiveness, both within and across schools. According to a recent analysis of New York City elementary school math teachers, for example, students whose teacher falls in the top quarter of effectiveness learn roughly 0.33 test score standard deviations more in a single year than students whose teachers are in the bottom quarter (Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger 2006).7 If disadvantaged children were taught by the most effective teachers, disparities in schooling outcomes might be narrowed. Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness are not very strongly correlated with the easiest-to-observe characteristics of teachers. Novice teachers are less effective than more experienced ones, but this experience premium disappears after the first few years of teaching (Rockoff 2004). Teachers who have higher scores on the SAT or various teaching exams are generally more effective than others (Harris and Sass 2007; Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2006), but many other observable teacher characteristics—such as whether they hold traditional teacher certifications or advanced degrees—are not systematically correlated with student learning (Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger 2006; Boyd et al. 2005; Hanushek 1997). Hence, the policy challenge in this domain is to induce more effective teachers to teach in schools serving the most disadvantaged children, knowing that effectiveness cannot easily be measured by those teacher characteristics that can be observed at the hiring stage. Given the relationship between wages and teacher labor supply (see, for example, Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004; Stinebrickner 2002; Scafidi, Sjoquist, and Stinebrickner 2007), one strategy is to entice teachers who have shown to be effective to work in hard-to-staff schools or subjects through financial incentives such as targeted salary increases or bonuses. Although many states have adopted some sort of financial assistance program (such as loan forgiveness, mortgage assistance, salary supplements), there has been little systematic evaluation (Imazeki 2007; Guarino, Santibañez, and Daley 2006; Glazerman et al. 2006). Evaluation of a targeted teacher bonus in North Carolina suggests that the program was successful in reducing teacher turnover rates in low-income or low-performing schools (Clotfelter et al. 2006). In California, from 2000 to 2002, the Governor’s Teaching Fellowship Program offer to academically talented teaching candidates of $20,000 bonuses to work in low-performing schools increased the rate at which such teachers started working in disadvantaged schools but did not seem to influence subsequent retention rates (Steele, Murnane, and Willet 2008). Key questions remain: Do such programs successfully lure new teachers into the profession who would not otherwise have taught? Or do these programs simply

/ 273 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies resort a fixed pool of teachers across schools? How long do any talented new teachers drawn into teaching by incentive programs remain in the classroom? And do financial incentives that are not tied to teacher performance induce ineffective teachers to locate in hard-to-staff schools? Despite these uncertainties, the dramatic variation in effectiveness that we observe among teachers highlights the great value of policies that entice more effective teachers to work in schools that serve disproportionately poor student bodies.

CHANGING SCHOOL PRACTICES

In the previous section, we argued that there are targeted ways of spending money on schooling that can improve long-term outcomes for children even without fundamentally restructuring how our school system currently operates. Yet all of these policy changes are expensive and so must compete for scarce government resources with a variety of other pressing societal concerns. Some observers of the U.S. schooling system remain skeptical that additional spending is needed to improve the learning outcomes of poor children. They argue that improving the ways in which schools are organized, including the ways in which they deliver instruction, could improve student achievement with few additional resources. This line of reasoning assumes there is good evidence on which practices are most effective, but that school personnel simply do not have the capacity to identify or implement these programs on their own. In this section, we discuss some low-cost changes in school operating practices that seem to improve student outcomes, including changes to school organization, classroom instruction, and teacher hiring and promotion. What remains unclear is why these “best practices” have not been more widely adopted. Presumably the obstacle has been some combination of lack of information, political resistance, bureaucratic inertia, and other factors.

Curricular and Instructional Interventions

In 2002 the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education created the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) in order to collect and disseminate scientific evidence on various educational interventions. A brief review of the WWC website highlights the lack of convincing evidence on curricular interventions. For example, the Everyday Mathematics curriculum was introduced in 1983 and has been used in 175,000 classrooms by around 2.8 million students (WWC 2007a). Yet WWC has found only four studies of Everyday Mathematics that meet its minimal standards of evidence “with reservations.” This lack of success is not limited to traditional “paper and pencil” curricula. There is also little evidence that educational software programs have significant impacts on student learning, despite their growing popularity (Dynarski et al. 2007). WWC found only one program with strong evidence of improving reading achievement among beginning

274 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children readers (Reading Recovery), one program for elementary school math (Everyday Mathematics), and two programs for middle school math (I Can Learn Algebra/ Pre-Algebra and Saxon Middle School Math). WWC excludes many studies that do not meet a minimal standard of evidence, but even the programs for which there is strong evidence of success according to WWC show a disappointingly low level of rigorous research. A more recent approach to school improvement known as comprehensive (or whole) school reform (CSR) attempts to improve many different aspects of the school simultaneously and in a fashion that makes the changes complementary and reinforcing. For example, a CSR model might combine curriculum materials, professional development, teacher mentoring, reorganization of the school day (for example, block scheduling) and school structure (for example, schools-within- a-school). CSR examples include Success for All (Borman and Hewes 2003), Comer Schools (Cook, Hunt, and Murphy 2000), Direct Instruction (CRSQ 2006), Accelerated Schools (Bloom et al. 2001), America’s Choice (CRSQ 2006), Career Academies (Kemple and Scott-Clayton 2004), Project GRAD (Snipes et al. 2006), First Things First (Quint et al. 2005), and Talent Development (Kemple, Herlihy, and Smith 2005). Unfortunately, as with curricular reforms, the evaluation evidence about the effectiveness of CSR programs is quite limited. Nevertheless, at the elementary school level a few models have been shown to improve student outcomes. One of the more promising interventions seems to be Success for All (SFA), a comprehensive whole-school reform model that operates in more than 1,200 mostly high-poverty Title I schools.8 SFA focuses on reading, with an emphasis on prevention and early intervention. Children receive ninety minutes each day of reading instruction in groups that are organized across grade levels based on each child’s current reading level, enabling teachers to target instruction. Cooperative learning exercises in which students discuss stories and learn from each other reinforce what is being taught and build students’ social skills. Both formal measures of reading competency and teacher observations are used to assess children at eight-week intervals. Children who fall behind are given extra tutoring or help with other problems, such as health or behavior problems. The program utilizes regular classroom teachers who receive brief initial training, ongoing coaching, and other forms of support and professional development. A random assignment evaluation of SFA documented that at the end of three years students in the treatment schools scored roughly 0.2 standard deviations higher than students in the control schools on a standardized reading assessment. These effects were equivalent to about one-fifth the gap between low- and high- socioeconomic-status children (Borman et al. 2007). SFA costs about $950 per student per year (Borman and Hewes 2003), with about two-thirds of this cost associated with the program’s tutoring component. Current spending under the federal government’s Title I program is around $880 per eligible student; there is little evidence that Title I funding as typically deployed by public schools translates into much gain in student learning (Gordon 2004; van der Klaauw 2008). One implication is that in schools serving predominantly poor students, SFA could be implemented mostly by just redeploying existing Title I

/ 275 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies funds. If the experimental evaluation of SFA is correct and the program’s impact is anything like 0.2 standard deviations, this type of funding shift would easily pass a benefit-cost test, since, as Alan Krueger (2003) shows, test score increases of this magnitude would increase the present value of each student’s lifetime earnings profile by thousands of dollars. At the high school level, CSR models tend to incorporate some common features, often involving a reorganization of the larger high school into smaller learning communities, referred to as “small schools,” “schools within a school,” or “learning academies.” Small learning communities aim to provide a more personalized learning environment that better engages and motivates students and prevents at-risk students from “falling through the cracks.” Other common reform features include work-based learning opportunities, such as internships, and assistance for students who enter high school with poor academic skills (Herlihy and Quint 2006). To date, however, there is little evidence that, as currently implemented, these high school CSR approaches improve student outcomes. The most rigorous evaluation of a high school CSR is MDRC’s random assignment study of Career Academies, which are organized as small learning communities of between 150 and 200 high school students (often housed within larger, comprehensive high schools) that focus on a specific occupation or industry. Unlike the vocational education programs that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, Career Academies combine academic and technical curricula, often using the technical curricula relevant to a particular industry to motivate students. One hallmark of these programs is establishing connections with employers in the field through mentoring and internships. Early results of the Career Academy evaluation indicated that students in the program reported that their school provided a more personalized learning environment relative to what students in the control group experienced. The program raised attendance and completion of course credits in the early years of high school. A later follow-up found no differences in high school completion rates between program and control groups, but did find a substantial impact on earnings among high-risk students (Kemple and Willner 2008). It is worth noting that the schooling attainment levels of both the treatment and control groups in the Career Academy study are higher than what we see for other urban public school samples. More research is needed to assess this approach and answer remaining questions: Do the positive effects documented in the prior research generalize to students who do not volunteer for the program? And are the career academies that have already been evaluated of higher quality than the typical career academy? The federal government can and should do more to improve the quality of research and development of curricular improvements and comprehensive school reform efforts by, for example, holding “design competitions.” Federal, state, and local governments could provide curriculum developers with incentives to do more rigorous evaluation of their products by requiring that schools devote resources to only those products proven to be effective in randomized trials (see Jacob and Ludwig 2005). The Institute for Education Sciences has already been

276 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children moving in this direction. But comparing the IES initiatives with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) requirement that new drugs be subject to at least three phases of clinical trials highlights how far we are from providing parents with similar assurances about the value of their children’s learning experiences at school.

Teacher Labor Markets

A key policy challenge for school districts is to induce more effective teachers to teach in high-poverty schools. As discussed earlier in this chapter, one strategy is to offer targeted financial incentives to individuals to teach in hard-to-staff schools or subjects. But there are also a variety of potential inefficiencies in schools’ hiring, promotion, and dismissal practices. At least some of these problems might be addressed without a substantial increase in resources.9 One promising approach is to promote alternative pathways into teaching. Traditional certification requirements impose a high cost (in terms of both money and time) on individuals interested in teaching, particularly on those with the best outside labor market options. As a result, certification requirements may help dissuade some highly skilled people from entering the teaching profession. Many studies have explored the relative effectiveness of teachers with traditional versus alternative (or no) certification. The emerging consensus is that differences between the groups are relatively small and that in certain grades and subjects teachers with alternative certification may actually outperform those with traditional certification (Boyd et al. 2005; Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger 2006; Glazerman et al. 2006). Hence, alternative certification may improve the supply of teachers without reducing quality. Given the wide variation in effectiveness, policies that help school officials identify and hire the best applicants could have an important impact on student outcomes. For example, staffing rules, late state budgets, and inefficient human resource procedures dissuade many qualified applicants from teaching in urban schools (Levin and Quinn 2003; Levin, Mulhern, and Schunck 2005). This suggests that changing collective bargaining agreements to reform staffing rules and taking a more efficient, customer-focused approach to HR might help improve teacher quality.10 Whatever system is used to hire teachers, it is inevitable that some teachers will not perform well in the classroom. Recognizing that the hiring process is imperfect, virtually all school systems place new teachers on probation for several years, subjecting them to an up-or-out tenure review. In practice, however, public schools typically do not take advantage of the probationary period to obtain additional information about teacher effectiveness and weed out lower-quality teachers.11 In New York City, for example, only about 50 out of roughly 75,000 teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons in recent years.12 In the Chicago Public Schools, only 15 out of 11,621 teachers who were evaluated in 2007 received a rating of unsatisfactory, and only 641 out of those 11,621 (roughly

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5.5 percent) received a rating of satisfactory. The remaining teachers were rated excellent or superior.13 One possible solution is to raise the tenure bar for new teachers and to deny tenure to those who are not effective at raising student achievement. Some have suggested that this type of evaluation should be based at least in part on teacher value-added scores (see, for example, Gordon, Kane, and Staiger 2006). We concur with the general recommendation to institute rigorous and meaningful tenure reviews, but would suggest that this type of high-stakes decision should be based on a variety of teacher performance measures that include, but are not limited to, measures of effectiveness at raising student test scores. Given the concerns about the reliability and validity of value-added measures discussed earlier, these indicators should not be the only criteria used in making high-stakes decisions such as teacher dismissal. Although commonly measured teacher characteristics have little correlation with student achievement, principals do recognize which teachers are most effective. Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren (2007) compare principal ratings of teacher effectiveness with “objective” measures of teacher effectiveness calculated using student achievement gains. They find that principals can identify the best and worst teachers, but have little ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of the ability distribution. This suggests that principal evaluations should be included as one factor in teacher tenure ratings, both because they may add additional information beyond student test scores and because they reduce potential negative effects of relying solely on an output-based measure (for example, teachers either cheating or teaching narrowly to the test in order to maximize short-run student test scores at the cost of skills that would maximize long-term learning). One might still be concerned that principals would be hesitant to deny tenure to many teachers. Several years ago, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers’ Union signed a collective bargaining agreement that gave principals considerable latitude to dismiss untenured teachers. Brian Jacob (2008) finds that the teachers selected for dismissal did have more absences and lower value-added scores than other probationary teachers in the same school who were not selected for dismissal, suggesting that principals consider productivity in making their decisions. He reports, however, that 30 to 40 percent of principals—including many at very low-performing schools—did not dismiss any teachers, suggesting that some administrators may be reluctant to remove poorly performing employees. One reason may be that it is difficult to hire high-quality replacements, and so principals might be reluctant to risk the chance of getting an even worse replacement. It is also possible that principals are reluctant to incur the social and political costs associated with dismissal. In either case, policies to raise the tenure bar must incorporate some system to ensure that difficult decisions actually get made.

INCENTIVES AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Class size reduction is an “input-based” educational intervention, based on the assumption that schools perform better with additional resources. Comprehensive school reform is based on the assumption that schools are not utilizing optimal

278 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children pedagogical practices, and therefore it seeks to improve schooling outcomes by prescribing a more effective instructional approach. Both strategies assume that educators are willing to work as hard as they can, given their resource constraints. In addition, prescriptive approaches that push schools to adopt specific practices also assume that it does not make sense for individuals to “reinvent the wheel,” and thus these approaches rely on centralized decisionmakers who presumably have better information about “best practices” for any given school than local principals and teachers. An alternative approach to school reform focuses on enhancing both the incentives and the flexibility enjoyed by school personnel. Although the theories underlying school choice and school accountability differ in important ways, both strategies rely on the core notions of incentives and flexibility. In this section, we review the existing empirical work on the impact of accountability and choice reforms on student outcomes. The available evidence to date is probably strongest on behalf of the ability of school accountability systems to change the behavior of teachers and principals, although one lesson from that body of research is the great importance of getting the design of such policies right.

Teacher Merit Pay

The issue of teacher compensation often arises in discussions of school reform. Most public school teachers are paid according to strict formulas that incorporate years of service and credits of continuing education, including master’s and doctor- ate degrees, despite the fact that research consistently finds that advanced degrees are not associated with better student performance and that experience matters only in the first few years of teaching. For this reason, reformers have suggested that a teacher’s compensation should be tied directly to his or her productivity as measured by student performance or supervisor evaluation. Proponents of “pay for performance,” also known as “merit” or “incentive” pay, argue that not only would it provide incentives for current teachers to work “harder” or “smarter,” but also that it could alter the type of people who enter the teaching force and then choose to remain. Critics of merit pay emphasize that teaching is a collaborative venture and that incentive pay for individuals could harm the teamwork necessary for effective schools. They note that it is difficult to monitor teachers and that because teachers are asked to achieve multiple objectives, a system that focuses on one easily observable outcome, such as student test scores, is likely to distort teacher behavior in ways that would harm other outcomes. For example, teachers may focus attention more on the subjects that “count” under the performance system, or they may neglect students they view as too far behind (or even too far ahead). Proponents counter that pay-for-performance systems can focus on teams of teachers or schools, and that distortions could be mitigated by incorporating principal evaluations as well as test scores. As Richard Murnane and David Cohen (1986) note, incentive pay has a long history in American education, though few systems that directly reward teachers

/ 279 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies on the basis of student performance have lasted very long. Although many teachers indicate that their compensation incorporates some aspect of incentive pay, there are few examples of pay that is tied very closely to student performance. One prominent example is the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), which incorporates incentive pay along with pay for additional professional development activ- ities and other services. TAP began in 1999 and, as of the 2008–2009 academic year, served 6,200 teachers nationwide who together taught 72,000 students (TAP 2009). This program is more popular than many old-style merit pay programs, and there is some evidence that it may improve student performance on standardized tests (Springer, Ballou, and Peng 2008). Given this tentative but positive evidence, we believe that it is worthwhile for schools and districts to continue experimenting with, and evaluating, pay for performance.

School Accountability Systems

Recent studies suggest that accountability reforms can foster positive changes in behavior by school administrators, teachers, and students. At the same time, research provides some warnings that incentive-based reforms often generate unintended negative consequences, such as teachers neglecting certain students, cutting corners, or even cheating to raise student test scores artificially. The fact that actors within the school system do respond to changes in incentives highlights both the promise and the pitfalls of accountability reform and underscores the importance of the specific design details of accountability policies. Although studies of school-based accountability policies in the 1980s and 1990s found mixed results (Jacob 2005), two major accountability reforms from the late 1990s—in Chicago and Florida—demonstrated positive results. In 1996 the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) introduced a comprehensive accountability policy designed to raise academic achievement. One component of the CPS reform was to place low-performing schools on probation, a process that entailed the expenditure of a modest amount of additional resources along with enhanced monitoring and the threat of future closure. Importantly, unlike the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability reform, the CPS policy focused on holding students as well as school staff accountable for learning by ending a practice commonly known as “social promotion”—advancing students to the next grade regardless of ability or achievement level. Jacob (2005) has found that math and reading achievement increased sharply following the introduction of this accountability policy, in comparison to both prior achievement trends in the district and changes experienced by other large urban districts in the Midwest. For younger students, however, the policy did not increase performance on a state-administered, low-stakes exam. Jacob’s analysis suggests that the observed achievement gains were driven by increases in test- specific skills and student effort. This finding is consistent with prior work suggesting that the test preparation associated with high-stakes testing may artificially

280 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children inflate achievement, producing gains that are not generalizable to other exams (see, for example, Koretz et al. 1991; Koretz and Barron 1998). Note that the policy did lead to substantial achievement gains for older students and that, for these students, the test-specific gains most likely represented real learning of the skills found on the high-stakes tests. David Figlio and Cecilia Rouse (2006) studied Florida’s A+ Plan for Education, a school-based accountability system implemented several years before the introduction of No Child Left Behind. In 1999 schools received “grades” based on their students’ test scores on the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT). Under the A+ Plan, schools that received a failing grade (“F”) in two consecutive years were required to offer their students vouchers to enroll in private schools. Schools that faced declining enrollments were subject to staff cuts and additional sanctions. It was hoped that the stigma associated with the highly visible failing grade, coupled with the threat of competition induced by the vouchers, would provide low-performing schools with an incentive to improve. Figlio and Rouse (2006) found that the designation of a school as failing led to a significant increase in student math performance, on the order of five scale score points, or roughly 0.1 standard deviations. The impact of receiving an “F” on a low-stakes math test is about half as large. Researchers studying later versions of Florida’s accountability system found similar effects (Chiang 2007; Rouse et al. 2007). Moreover, they found that many of these learning gains were sustained in the following few years. Although these studies suggest that accountability policies can improve student achievement, other studies show that educators respond strategically to test-based accountability in many unintended ways, some of which may have negative consequences for students. Jacob (2005) found that educators in Chicago responded to the accountability program by placing a larger fraction of low-performing students in special education (thus removing them from the test-taking pool14), retaining a larger fraction of students before they reached the grades where they would be subject to accountability mandates (that is, in kindergarten through second grade), and shifting attention away from subjects, such as science and social studies, that were not used to determine student or school sanctions under the accountability policy. Each of these responses increased a school’s measured performance, even though they seem inappropriate and detrimental to student learning. However, it is also possible that some, and perhaps most, educators viewed these steps as appropriate responses that would benefit students.15 A growing body of research also suggests that accountability systems generate larger improvements among students who are relatively closer to the passing threshold used to reward schools (Chakrabarti 2008; Neal and Schanzenbach 2007). Finally, Jacob and Levitt (2003) found that the prevalence of teacher cheating rose sharply in low-achieving classrooms following the introduction of Chicago’s accountability policy. Two recent studies utilized data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to assess the impact of standards-based accountability across a variety of states, rather than focusing on case studies of a single jurisdiction’s

/ 281 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies policy. These studies are important because the NAEP data were not used by any state as part of its accountability program; thus, educators had no incentive to manipulate test scores in the way that prior studies document has occurred for high-stakes exams in individual states. Both studies find positive achievement effects overall, although they do not find evidence that accountability policies have consistently reduced the racial achievement gap (Carnoy and Loeb 2003; Hanushek and Raymond 2005). A review of simple national time trends in the recent NAEP data suggests that NCLB may have improved student achievement, particularly the math performance of younger children. To our knowledge, however, there has been no systematic investigation of the impact of NCLB at a national level that attempts to account for prior achievement trends or the presence of other policies. Yet even without any direct evaluation evidence about NCLB, the available accountability research suggests a number of modifications to NCLB that, in our view, would seem likely to do some good. First, we would encourage the adoption of a single achievement standard for all districts in the country. The provision that allowed states to choose the tests they use for measuring student performance has resulted in vast disparities in the academic rigor of accountability requirements across states. Knowing the political difficulty in imposing a uniform national standard, we support the recent voluntary efforts by national associations of state officials and educators to adopt common standards. Second, we recommend moving away from a single proficiency level—that is, holding schools accountable for the share of students with scores above some single cutoff value—since this provides schools with an incentive to neglect students who are far above or below this threshold. Instead, schools should be held accountable for the gains that all students make each year. Third, if the current level of federal funding is not increased substantially, we suggest that states and districts be given the flexibility to focus on the schools most in need of improvement.

School Choice

Another way to clarify goals or change incentives is to give parents a greater choice of schools for their children through public magnet schools, charter schools, or vouchers for private schools. Choice proponents suggest that by creating a mar- ketplace where parents can select schools, a choice-based system might generate competition that would improve the quality of schools throughout the market- place. This theory rests on several assumptions, including the assumption that the degree of choice would be large enough to generate meaningful competition. For example, a handful of charter schools with limited enrollment capacity is unlikely to generate meaningful competition in a large district. This suggests that a choice system must permit relatively easy entry into the market by potential suppliers, including individuals and organizations wishing to open schools. There must also

282 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children be an easy “exit” from the market that allows (and indeed forces) unsuccessful schools to close.16 The second set of assumptions involves the information available to parents and their preferences for their children’s education. Parents must have sufficient information to make an informed choice. Data on school performance must be transparent, accessible, and easily understood by parents with varying degrees of sophistication. The effects of choice also depend in large part on the nature of the preferences themselves. Expanded choice is only likely to increase student academic outcomes if achievement is a central concern for parents. The most rigorous studies assessing parental preferences typically find that parents place a high value on proximity and student racial composition (Glazerman 1998; Calvo 2006; Hastings, Kane, and Staiger 2006a). On average, parents place limited value on the “academic quality” of the school according to measures like student test scores, though parents with higher income tend to place a higher priority on test scores (Hastings, Kane, and Staiger 2006b). Although these results suggest that choice plans do not lead to higher performance among poor children, there is some evidence that providing poor families with more transparent information about school quality does lead parents to select “better” schools in terms of academic performance (Hastings, van Weelden, and Weinstein 2007). Even if school choice does not foster competition that increases the productivity of schooling overall, the opportunity to choose may still have a positive effect on students. Choice might allow a student to attend a school with better teachers, more resources, or more studious peers. Whether this re-sorting of children across schools improves average outcomes for all children or simply changes the distribution of academic achievement across children depends on whether some children gain more from “better” peer settings than others. Of course, if the goal is to reduce inequity in schooling opportunities and outcomes and school choice provides choices to disadvantaged students who would not have them otherwise, then choice may still have served a worthwhile purpose. Some argue that choice gives low-income parents the opportunities that wealthier parents have always had. The availability of choice may also improve student outcomes if it allows parents to find schools that are a better “match” for their individual child’s needs, a possibility that, in principle, could allow most students to benefit from choice.17 Some would argue that if choice allows parents to select the type of schools they want for their children, the system should be considered a success. While this may be true from the parents’ perspective, if society values certain outcomes more than others, then free choice on the part of parents may not maximize social welfare. There are hundreds of studies on school choice that cover everything from charter schools to private voucher plans. However, the vast majority of research in this area suffers from a critical limitation, which researchers refer to as selection bias. Students who utilize school choice—whether it is to attend a public magnet school, a charter school, or a private school—differ from students who do not, both in

/ 283 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies terms of easily observable ways, such as race, income, and achievement level, and of more subtle ways such as personal motivation or family support. If researchers do not account for such differences when comparing, for example, charter schools with neighborhood public schools, then the results can be misleading. The best studies of the impact on student achievement of attending a public school of choice overcome the problem of selection bias by focusing on choice schools that are oversubscribed and use random lotteries to determine admission. By comparing the outcomes of students who win and lose lotteries, the researchers can estimate the causal impact of attending a public school of choice. Looking at elementary and high schools in Chicago, Julie Berry Cullen, Brian Jacob, and Steven Levitt (2006) find that winning a choice lottery has no effect on a wide range of academic outcomes.18 In a study of school choice lotteries in the Charlotte- Mecklenberg School District in North Carolina, Justine Hastings and her colleagues (2006b) find that, on average, students do not benefit from winning one of the lotteries and attending their preferred school. However, when they examine children whose parents seemed to place a greater value on academics (based on the type of schools they chose), these authors find that these students do experience higher test scores from winning the public school choice lottery. Finally, as noted earlier, there is some evidence that career academies, one prominent type of public choice school, have positive effects on student outcomes (Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt 2005; Kemple and Willner 2008). A parallel literature that analyzes the effect of attending a charter school on academic outcomes yields similarly mixed outcomes. Several studies find small negative or zero effects (Hanushek et al. 2005; Bifulco and Ladd 2006; Sass 2006). A recent random evaluation of New York City charters uses a lottery-based research design, comparing students who win and lose lotteries to oversubscribed charter schools, and finds robust positive effects (Hoxby and Murarka 2007). This approach removes concerns about selection bias but has the drawback of focusing on a small number of particularly successful (or at least popular) charter schools. Perhaps the most contentious form of school choice involves vouchers that allow students to attend private schools. Voucher experiments in Milwaukee, New York, Dayton, and Washington, D.C., have been evaluated. These studies typically focus on comparing outcomes between students who are offered the chance to attend private schools and those who are not. The results in most cities were discourag- ing, but the evaluation in New York City pointed to some modest test score gains for African American children, even if the magnitude of these results has been debated (Howell, Peterson, and Wolf 2002; Krueger and Zhu 2004). The most difficult area of school choice to analyze empirically is the claim that choice will foster competition that will, in turn, improve the productivity of all schools. Caroline Hoxby (2000) compared geographic areas and found that those areas with more school choice for largely historical reasons (for example, streams and rivers made transportation difficult in earlier times and thus encour- aged areas to divide themselves along the boundary of such waterways) had more productive schools, suggesting that greater choice is associated with greater effi- ciency in schooling. Others have argued, however, that these results are not par-

284 / Improving Educational Outcomes for Poor Children ticularly robust (Rothstein 2007a; Hoxby 2007). Miguel Urquiola (2005) finds evidence of sorting—the “best” public school students leaving for the private sector. Areas with greater district choice tend to have a smaller fraction of students attending private schools, but these districts also have schools that are more racially homogenous. In summary, there is mixed evidence on whether the opportunity to attend a choice school—public magnet, charter, or private—has substantial academic benefits for poor children, and the question of whether large-scale choice programs improve the productivity of schools in general also remains unresolved. It is premature to make strong claims about whether such policies can have substantial benefits for disadvantaged children. In our view, the main risk associated with expanded choice opportunities is the possibility of exacerbating the segregation of poor, minority, or low-performing students within a subset of schools. This seems to have happened to some degree in New Zealand and Chile under the large-scale choice plans adopted in those countries (Fiske and Ladd 2000; Ladd and Fiske 2001; Hsieh and Urquiola 2006). As both Derek Neal (2002) and Helen Ladd (2002) point out, however, the effects of any choice plan are likely to depend cru- cially on the details of key design questions, such as whether schools are allowed to select the best students from their applicant pools. Many of the current public school choice plans require oversubscribed schools to admit students on the basis of lotteries, providing some guard against this type of sorting. Recognizing these concerns, we would encourage states and districts to continue experimenting and evaluating different forms of public school choice (for example, magnet or charter schools) to learn more about their potential impacts.

THE ROLE OF STUDENT BACKGROUND

Some people believe that the disappointing performance of our public schools, particularly those serving a low-income population, is due in large part to the challenges that poor children face outside of school. At some level this is clearly true. Going back at least to the Coleman Report in 1966, we have known that differences in family background help explain a large share of the variation in academic achievement outcomes across children. Poor children have substantially lower achievement test scores than nonpoor children as young as ages three or four— before they even start school. More relevant for present purposes is whether the challenges of living in poverty cause poor children to benefit less than nonpoor children from similar types of schooling experiences. Our reading of the available evidence suggests that improving the quality of academic programs is at the very least sufficient to make noticeable improvements in poor children’s educational outcomes. In fact, studies of different early childhood education programs, as well as of Tennessee’s STAR class size reduction experiment, typically find that disadvantaged children benefit even more from these interventions than do nonpoor children.

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This finding by itself does not resolve the long-standing debates about whether education and other social policies should be targeted at poor families or instead made universal, since political-economy considerations are also relevant. Nor are we arguing against the value of social policies that seek to improve children’s life chances by lifting them out of poverty (such as the policies reviewed by Katherine Magnuson and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal in this volume). Our point instead is that social policy changes that reduce child poverty in the United States, as desirable as they may be on their own merits, are not a necessary precondition for enacting education reforms that improve poor children’s outcomes by enough to justify the costs of these reforms. At the same time, the geographic concentration of poor children in neighborhoods that are segregated by race and social class presents special challenges for education policy, given that children have traditionally attended neighborhood schools. For example, research suggests that, all else being equal, teachers tend to prefer to work in schools that serve more affluent and less racially diverse student bodies (Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004). So the quality of the teachers available to poor children depends in part on whether they attend school mostly with other poor children or have a more socioeconomically diverse set of schoolmates. As another example, accountability policies must isolate the contribution of teachers and principals to student learning. Accountability systems that fail to account adequately for the confounding influence of family background may help drive the most effective teachers out of high-poverty schools. Peer characteristics may matter directly for student learning; teachers may set the level or pace of instruction to match the average student ability in their classroom. And students may learn from one another, or they may exert a negative influence on each other by disrupting classroom instruction. While empirical identification of peer effects has proven to be quite challenging in practice, the available research provides at least suggestive evidence that peer influences may be relevant (for an extensive review, see Vigdor and Ludwig 2008). In theory, education policies could overcome the burden that concentrated poverty imposes on poor children by breaking the link between place of resi- dence and school assignment. Some evidence suggests that earlier school desegregation efforts did improve the schooling outcomes of disadvantaged children. For example, Jonathan Guryan (2004) finds that dropout rates for blacks declined by around 25 percent when the largest urban school districts in the United States were forced by local federal court order to racially desegregate in the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, despite the fact that some white families responded by attending private schools or moving to other public school districts (for an extensive review of the segregation literature, see Vigdor and Ludwig 2008). However, the potential for contemporaneous desegregation policies to achieve large gains in student outcomes remains unclear. First, there are substantial barriers—both logistical and political—to further integrating schools along race or class lines. Although there was some decline in residential segregation by race after

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1970, neighborhoods remained more segregated by household income in 2000 than in 1970 (Jargowsky 2003; Watson 2006; Vigdor and Ludwig 2008). The substantial amount of residential segregation by race and social class that remains in the United States limits how much school desegregation can be accomplished, since the U.S. Supreme Court made it very difficult to enact across-district desegregation plans in the Milliken v. Bradley decision (418 US 717, 1974). More generally, the majority of Supreme Court decisions on school desegregation since the early 1970s have restricted the ability of districts to promote integration (Kahlenberg 2001), including two decisions in 2007 striking down desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville (Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in the Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). Second, the substantial change in both schooling and social conditions for poor children since the initial desegregation efforts may limit the effectiveness of desegregation efforts today. For example, while still far from equal, the difference in resources across poor and nonpoor schools has greatly narrowed since the early 1970s. A different approach to addressing the problem of concentrated poverty is to use housing policy to help poor families move into different neighborhoods. In practice, data from the Experimental Housing Allowance Program in the 1970s and a more recent randomized housing voucher lottery in Chicago indicate that the provision of housing subsidies to families who are already living in private-market housing does little to change their neighborhood environment (Olsen 2003; Jacob and Ludwig 2009). Housing policy does seem to be able to help public housing families move into less disadvantaged neighborhoods, although it should be noted that only a modest share of all poor families with children currently live in public housing (Olsen 2003). Moreover, it is unclear whether moving to a more advantaged neighborhood per se improves a child’s academic outcomes. The most compelling evidence on this point comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which, starting in 1994, randomly gave 4,600 mostly minority families living in public housing in five cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York) the chance to use a housing voucher to move into private-market housing in a less disadvantaged neighborhood. MTO families offered the chance to move with a voucher wound up living in less eco- nomically disadvantaged neighborhoods compared to control group families, but the children in these families showed no statistically significant improvement on either reading or math test scores in the first five years following the move (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2006).19 Reducing the prevalence in the United States of either child poverty or the geographic concentration of poverty is difficult. As the editors note in their introduction to this volume, the United States has made little progress in reducing its poverty rate since the early 1970s. The concentration of poverty within census tracts increased substantially from 1970 to 1990, and despite a significant decline in the 1990s, the number of people living in high-poverty tracts was still substantially higher in 2000 than in 1970 (Jargowsky 2003). Although the well-being of children

/ 287 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies is not served by the persistence of these social problems, they do not undermine the potential to help poor children escape from poverty by improving their educational opportunities.

CONCLUSION

The release of the landmark Coleman Report in 1966 fostered pessimism about the ability of schools to improve the life chances of poor children. The report found that a variety of school “inputs” such as teacher educational attainment and per pupil spending were only weakly correlated with student test scores, and it raised questions about what schools could accomplish without broader changes in social policy. The Coleman Report and subsequent research pushed policymakers to consider outcome-based measures of success and spurred interest in reform strategies that focus on changing the incentives within the public school system. A careful review of the empirical evidence has suggested, however, that a variety of policies are likely to improve substantially the academic performance of poor children. Importantly, we found examples of successful programs or policies within each of the three broad categories outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Targeted investment of additional resources in early childhood education, smaller class sizes, and bonuses for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subjects are practices that are likely to pass a cost-benefit test, even without a fundamental reorganization of the existing public school system. At the same time, researchers have identified some ways of changing standard operating procedures within schools that can improve the outcomes of poor children even without large amounts of additional spending. Examples include the adoption of comprehensive school reform models like Success for All and Career Academies and the expansion of alternative certification opportunities. Finally, policies that seek to change incentives within schools, such as the accountability policies adopted by districts and states since the mid- 1990s, offer some promise of improving schooling for poor children. Given limited financial resources and perhaps even more limited political attention, it is unlikely that policymakers could adopt all of the “successful” practices discussed in this chapter. Based on our read of the empirical literature, we believe that the following should be the highest priorities for education policies to improve the academic achievement of poor children:

1. Increase investments in early childhood education for poor children. Even though short-term gains in IQ or achievement test scores diminish over time, there is evidence of long-term improvement in a variety of outcomes, such as educational attainment, that help children escape from poverty as adults. Increased investment in early childhood education is particularly important given the limited investment our society currently makes in the cognitive development of very young children. This should be the top priority for new spending in public education.

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2. Take advantage of the opportunity provided by No Child Left Behind to better utilize accountability reforms to improve outcomes for poor children. NCLB was enacted in 2001 with bipartisan support, although it has received considerable criticism from all sides in recent years. In our view, the debate over the existence of NCLB misses a fundamental lesson we have learned about accountability in the past decade: the specific design of a program matters enormously. It would be a shame if the current (often legitimate) concerns with how NCLB has been implemented lead to a retreat from outcome-oriented accountability in education. Instead, we would recommend several changes to NCLB as well as coexisting state and district accountability systems: adopting common achievement standards across states, focusing accountability on student growth rather than proficiency levels, providing states and districts with the flexibility to focus limited resources on the neediest schools, and reconciling federal and state accountability systems. 3. Give educators incentives to adopt practices with a compelling research base while expanding efforts (and increasing resources) to develop and identify effective instructional regimes. One of the lessons from the accountability movement is that highly disadvantaged schools (and districts) often lack the capacity to change themselves. There is good evidence that certain comprehensive school reforms such as Success for All can raise achievement levels among poor children with little additional expenditures. Similarly, there is compelling evidence that alternative certification routes into teaching can expand the supply of teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools and subjects while maintaining, or perhaps even increasing, teacher quality. State and district officials should ensure that disadvantaged schools, particularly those that have continued to fail under recent accountability systems, adopt instructional practices and related policies that have a strong research base. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. At the same time, the federal government could help spur such advantages through more focused R&D spending (for example, through “design competitions,” as suggested by Slavin 1997), and governments at all levels could help increase the supply of high-quality practices by requiring schools to use programs that have been rigorously evaluated (Jacob and Ludwig 2005). 4. Continue to support and evaluate a variety of public school choice options. The other noteworthy trend in output-based reform aside from NCLB is the spread of public school choice at the local level. Although we believe that the current evidence on the benefits of public school choice is limited, we also feel that the risk associated with these policies is small so long as they are implemented in ways that do not substantially exacerbate school segregation along race or class lines. Hence, we would encourage states to facilitate the expansion of magnet and charter schools and to evaluate carefully the impact of these schools on the students they serve and on the surrounding schools.

Most antipoverty policies focus on lifting adults out of poverty. These policies are often controversial because of an unavoidable tension between the desire to

/ 289 Changing Poverty, Changing Policies help people who have been unlucky and the motivation to encourage hard work and avoid rewarding socially unproductive behavior. In contrast, successful education policies can not only help reduce poverty over the long term by making poor children more productive during adulthood, but also foster economic growth that expands the “pie” for everyone. Educational interventions also benefit from a compelling moral justification as well: disadvantaged children should not be punished for the circumstances into which they were born. Improved education policy is one of the best ways to prevent this from happening.

Thanks to Helen Ladd, Betsey Stevenson, the editors, and conference participants at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty and the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank and the University of Pennsylvania for helpful comments. All opinions and any errors are, of course, ours alone.

NOTES

1. Note that these disparities in schooling outcomes along race and class lines are not simply due to immigration into the United States by those with low initial levels of English or other academic skills, since, for example, reading and math disparities in NAEP scores are large among fourth- and eighth-graders even between non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks; see U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “NAEP Data Explorer,” available at: www.nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/nde (accessed August 4, 2008). 2. The official evaluation of the program found impacts on elementary prereading and prewriting skills equal to about 0.3 and 0.2 of a standard deviation, respectively (Puma et al. 2005; Ludwig and Phillips 2007). If one calculates Head Start impacts by pooling together the three- and four-year-olds in the experiment, the increased statistical power leads to significant program impacts on math scores and on almost all of the other main cognitive skill outcomes in the report (Ludwig and Phillips 2007). 3. See Northwestern University, Institute for Policy Research Briefing, “Children’s Achievement: What Does the Evidence Say About Teachers, Pre-K Programs, and Economic Policies,” slide 16, “Irrelevant Difference 3: The Head Start Comparison Hurdle Is Higher,” available at: http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/events/briefing dec06-cook/slide16.html. 4. Some prior research has found that while prekindergarten programs improve cognitive outcomes, they may have adverse effects on noncognitive outcomes like self- control (see, for example, Magnuson, Ruhm, and Waldfogel 2004). The evidence on this issue is not yet available for the new state pre-K programs. 5. This section is based on the summary of Project STAR research by Diane Schan- zenbach (2007).

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6. Effects for outcomes such as criminal involvement or teen births yield point esti- mates that are in the direction of beneficial CSR impacts but are imprecisely estimated (Schanzenbach 2007). 7. There are three concerns with value-added measures of effectiveness. One involves the statistical precision of the measures and the possible biases inherent in such measures. Given the small number of students an individual teacher works with in any given year (that is, fifteen or twenty for many elementary school teachers) and the imperfect reliability of student achievement tests, teacher “value-added” measures are generally measured with considerable error (Kane and Staiger 2002a, 2002b). That is, the “con- fidence interval” around an estimate of a teacher’s effectiveness is often quite large. A second concern is that students are not randomly assigned to classrooms, and hard- to-measure student characteristics may influence the rate of growth in their test scores, not just the levels of their scores. So value-added measures may partly confound the causal contribution of the teacher to student learning with those of the characteristics of their students (Rothstein 2007b). A third concern is that the impact of having an effective teacher may fade out over time (Jacob et al. 2008). 8. Several other elementary school models show promise, including Direct Instruction (CRSQ 2006). One of the only other reform models that has been rigorously evaluated is the Comer Schools program, although one problem identified by the research is the limited degree of difference between Comer treatment schools and control schools in the implementation of Comer-style school practices (Cook et al. 1999; Cook, Hunt, and Murphy 2000). 9. There has been little research on teacher “demand” policies. One reason is the percep- tion that disadvantaged school districts are in a state of perpetual shortage and thus will hire anyone who walks through the door. In reality, although many disadvantaged districts often experience shortages in certain subjects and grade levels, they have an ample supply of teachers for most positions. For example, the Chicago Public Schools regularly receive ten applications for each position. 10. This discussion draws on Jacob (2007). Professional development, including mentoring for novice teachers, is another strategy for enhancing teacher ability. Such policies are complements to the policies discussed in this section. For a review, see Hill (2007). 11. As mentioned earlier, professional development is clearly an important complement to the dismissal of underperforming probationary teachers. 12. Personal communication with Jonah Rockoff, February 19, 2008. 13. Calculations by Brian Jacob from Chicago Public Schools administrative records. 14. Unlike more recent accountability reforms, the program in Chicago did not explicitly monitor the fraction of students who were tested so that placing students in special education would benefit a school rating. 15. A struggling student may benefit from placement in special education services. Similarly, teachers and administrators often believe that holding children back in an earlier grade provides them with additional opportunities to mature and to master basic skills before moving on to higher grades. Also, the focus on math and reading relative to science and social studies was one intended goal of the program. 16. If the administrators and teachers in a public school that loses half of its students to a nearby charter school continue teaching the smaller group of students who remain, or

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are merely reassigned to other schools in the district, they may not change their practices despite the pressure exerted by the nearby charter. 17. For example, the back-to-basics, discipline-oriented “academy” may be a good fit for some students, while other children may be more likely to thrive in an environment that provides more flexibility and autonomy. Or a good “match” may reflect more mundane needs, including proximity to the parents’ work or the availability of a particular elective. 18. For high school students, Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt (2005) find some evidence that winning a choice lottery improves certain non-academic outcomes such as the likeli- hood of getting into trouble with the police. 19. MTO itself was motivated by the quasi-experimental Gautreaux Program, which moved African American families in Chicago out of public housing to different parts of the metropolitan area. Follow-up surveys suggested that children in families who relocated to the suburbs had much better educational outcomes than those who moved to other parts of the city of Chicago (Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000), although whether city and suburban movers were comparable at baseline remains unclear. There is evidence of positive academic effects for certain subgroups in the MTO experiment, mainly children in the nearly all-black MTO sites in Baltimore and Chicago; this is consistent with non-experimental evidence for African American children in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (Sampson, Sharkey, and Raudenbush 2008). A ten-year follow-up study of MTO that is currently in progress should provide better evidence on the academic impacts of neighborhood environments.

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